The Alleged Simplicity of Food

Tonight I made a white-bean hummus, using dried European Soldier beans (a large variety), garlic scapes, cumin, lemon juice, and olive oil. Once the beans were softened through a one-hour soak and low boil, the entire preparation took about five minutes. My husband and I sampled the mixture as it was whirring in the food processor, and after I had scooped about 95 percent of it into a storage dish for refrigeration, we enjoyed what was left in the mixing bowl. So flavorful. So easy. Just a few minutes, and it's done.

Only it's not quite as simple as that.

The beans came from our backyard garden, as did the garlic scapes. Although I can't claim credit for producing the cumin, lemon juice, or oil, working the land as we have for the past three years makes me acutely conscious of the fact that these items, too, were produced by someone somewhere on this planet initially. In many ways, the flavor of the hummus was enhanced by the fact that we grew its main ingredient ourselves. But as I was marveling at how quickly the preparation came together I started to remember the labor that went into producing that main ingredient: the beans.

From that perspective, the main ingredient for the hummus took about a year to migrate from farm field to fork. We planted our dried bean crop in late June of 2013, and spent a summer watering the plants, weeding the spaces in and around them, beating back a small bug infestation, and building a solar-powered electric fence around all of our fields to deter the area deer. When we harvested our dried beans in October, we were ecstatic. Our harvest filled two empty chicken feed sacks, each of which had held 100 pounds of grain.

A mistake in planning meant we spent the winter, spring, and now the early summer slowly husking all of those beans. To this date, a four-foot-tall garden bin still remains half-full of unhusked beans. With husking came sorting, and as spring advanced toward summer, we found ourselves in the midst of the next garden season. Quickly, we chose about 100 black turtle beans, 100 Vermont cranberry beans, and 100 European Soldiers to plant for this year, along with some pinto beans we'd acquired from a local farmer and some garbanzo beans from an Indian grocery store that we decided to try planting on a whim.

This year's beans have sprouted and are growing fast. Still, there's more work to be done: more weeding, more fertilizing, more harvesting, and husking.

I raise these points because growing one's own food increasingly calls attention to the value of food itself. Knowing what it takes to grow a meal -- or even a simple snack like hummus -- has made me increasingly conscious of how, when, why, and how much I actually eat. I find myself treasuring every bite, and feel compelled not to let anything we cook -- or others cook for us -- go to waste. This consciousness of food seems better than the best diet because you're always eating just enough to satisfy you and you're always appreciating every bite.

It surprises me increasingly that this simple level of awareness disappears in a society of gluttony, eating that is so fast-paced that it seems to be more like scarfing, and over-indulgence. That, of course, applies to the "haves" side of the spectrum, and does not include the tens of millions who suffer chronic hunger because the means to produce what one needs simply does not exist for them. These conditions cause me to wonder how we grew so alienated from the means of production of food in the first place, and what it is about modernity that enables us so gleefully to accept those circumstances.

The garden that grows in our backyard has expanded over three years. It provides nearly all of the vegetables we eat year-round, eggs, and, as of this year, strawberries and chicken. We are hoping to grow other berries, revitalize the apple trees, raise bees for honey, and over time other animals for meat. While we are far from poor, we live with a small bank account: We stretch the bi-weekly paycheck hard to pay our bills and count many things that friends and colleagues take for granted as rare luxuries. Still, in our home, there's always enough to eat and usually some to share. While we try to eat mindfully, we do not go hungry. That equation of low cash and high yields seems so simple.

Yet, it's one that is based in a ever-evolving understanding of value. I thought of that as I scraped the mixing bowl in which I'd made the hummus striving to not let any of it go to waste. A lot of hours of planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, and husking went into that hummus. The least we could do was slowly savor every bite.